Investors Directory

Plug and Play Philippines is the local National Startup Accelerator Program run under a formal, two-year partnership between Plug and Play, the Silicon Valley-founded global innovation platform active since 2006 and connected to over 35,000 startups and 500-plus corporate partners worldwide, and the Philippine Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), publicly launched in Makati in April 2024. Rather than an independent Philippine-founded fund, it exists because the government sought out a global accelerator brand to run a formal local program, targeting roughly 40 startups a year across two six-month cohorts, focused on AI, cybersecurity, software development, animation, agritech, and food technology. DFNN Inc., a listed Philippine tech company, joined as a private-sector partner, testing incubating companies' products and contributing seed funding alongside DTI-referred sponsors. Participants receive mentorship and limited direct equity funding, plus access to Plug and Play's global network, reported by the firm at roughly billion in accessible capital — a genuinely different value proposition from a fund writing its own large checks, stated plainly here rather than oversold.

QED Investors is a venture capital firm founded in 2007 by Nigel Morris, Frank Rotman, and Caribou Honig, all former Capital One executives (Morris had served as the company's President and COO before departing in 2004). Headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, the firm invests exclusively in financial technology, describing itself as "fintech operators turned fintech investors." QED reports roughly $4.0 billion under management, with about $2.4 billion invested to date across more than 250 portfolio companies, 31 of which have reached unicorn status. The firm's investments span 27 countries across five continents — it began investing in the U.S. in 2007, expanded into Europe in 2012, Latin America in 2014, Asia and India in 2021, and Africa in 2022 — with team members based in the U.S., England, Singapore, Mexico, and Brazil. Notable portfolio companies include Credit Karma (acquired by Intuit for roughly $7 billion), the Brazilian digital bank Nubank, and cross-border remittance company Remitly.

💰 Check size: Over $5M

Ribbit Capital is a Palo Alto-based venture capital firm founded in 2012 by Venezuelan entrepreneur Micky Malka, focused almost exclusively on financial technology. The firm reported roughly $12 billion in assets under management as of 2024, run by a lean team of around 30 people, and is known for concentrating large amounts of capital in a small number of high-conviction fintech bets rather than building a broad, diversified portfolio. Ribbit's best-known investment is Robinhood Markets, where it has deployed more than $500 million since first backing the trading app in 2014; other portfolio companies include Coinbase, the Brazilian digital bank Nubank, and Credit Karma. It also backed One, a fintech venture later folded into Walmart, valued at $2.5 billion in 2024. The firm's name comes from the Hebrew word ribit, meaning interest.

Rocketship.vc is a data-science-driven venture capital firm co-founded by serial entrepreneurs Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, who previously co-founded Junglee (acquired by Amazon) and Kosmix (acquired by Walmart, later becoming @WalmartLabs). Its leadership also includes Managing Partners Madhu Shalini Iyer, former Chief Data Officer of Gojek, and Sailesh Ramakrishnan, co-founder of LocBox. The firm describes itself as remote-first, with a team drawing on backgrounds in data mining research (having co-authored what it describes as the most-downloaded data mining textbook) and prior work on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission. (Note: this session could not independently confirm Rocketship.vc's exact founding year through a live, fetchable source — stated honestly rather than guessed.) The firm has invested in more than 70 companies across at least 14 countries, spanning India (Apna, FamPay, Khatabook, Quizizz, NoBroker), Africa (Chipper Cash, Kippa), the Middle East (Sary, Qashio), Latin America (Trocafone), Indonesia (BukuWarung, Kitalulus), and the U.S. (early investments in Facebook and Lyft), with several exits including Paperspace, Locus, and Later.

Seedstars is a Switzerland-based investment and acceleration platform founded in 2012 in Geneva by Pierre-Alain Masson, Michael Weber, and Adrien, three Swiss entrepreneurs, with Alisée de Tonnac joining shortly after as co-CEO and co-founder. It began as a global startup-competition circuit ("Seedstars World") run in dozens of emerging and frontier markets and has since grown into a broader investment platform, running seed and early-stage funds (including Seedstars International Ventures and, more recently, a dedicated Seedstars Africa Ventures fund that reported a US$42 million first close in late 2024) alongside its acceleration programs. The Philippines has a real, if modest, connection to Seedstars: "Seedstars Manila" is a recurring local leg of the global Seedstars World competition, which surfaces and pitches early-stage Philippine startups as part of the worldwide circuit. This is a competition/community touchpoint rather than confirmed direct fund investment into a named Philippine company — no specific Philippine investee was independently confirmed for this profile beyond the Manila competition itself.

Sequoia Capital is one of the world's most prominent venture capital firms, founded in 1972 by Don Valentine in Menlo Park, California, where it remains headquartered today. As of late 2025 the firm is led by joint managing partners Alfred Lin and Pat Grady, and it reports roughly US$56.3 billion in assets under management as of 2024 — placing it among the largest and longest-running venture firms in the world. Note for this profile specifically: Sequoia's own India and Southeast Asia investment arm formally separated from the firm in June 2023 and now operates independently under the name Peak XV Partners (led by Shailendra Singh and GV Ravishankar); this entry describes Sequoia Capital itself, the original U.S.- and Europe-focused parent firm, not Peak XV. Sequoia's investment history spans more than five decades of category-defining technology bets, from early backing of Apple (1978), Atari (1975), and Cisco through to modern-era investments in Google, WhatsApp, Airbnb, Stripe, YouTube, and Snowflake. The firm's track record is not without high-profile losses — it wrote down its roughly US$214 million investment in the cryptocurrency exchange FTX to zero following FTX's 2022 collapse, a widely reported setback for the firm.

💰 Check size: Over $5M

SIG Venture Capital is the direct-investment venture arm of Susquehanna International Group (SIG), a privately-held quantitative trading and financial services firm founded in May 1987 by Jeff Yass, Arthur Dantchik, and a group of co-founders, headquartered in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. SIG is one of the world's largest privately-held financial services firms, with over $868 billion in total assets and 2024 revenue of $7.2 billion, built primarily on market-making, institutional brokerage, and proprietary trading in equities, fixed income, and derivatives. Its venture arm — often branded SIG Asia VC given its long regional history — has been actively investing in startups for more than 15 years, expanding into China in 2005 and Japan in 2014, and operates from SIG's global office network spanning the US, Europe (Dublin, London), and Asia (Shanghai, Beijing, Hong Kong, Tokyo). A distinguishing feature of SIG Venture Capital is that it invests its own permanent capital rather than raising and deploying a traditional fund with a fixed lifecycle — this lets it commit to portfolio companies over long, flexible time horizons across deal types and stages from Series A through pre-IPO. The team of 20+ investment and operations professionals has backed more than 50 companies with a combined reported revenue exceeding $2.5 billion and combined EBITDA over $350 million. Its best-known investment is ByteDance, where SIG made an initial $5 million bet in 2012 that had grown to a stake worth more than $15 billion by 2020; other confirmed investments include enterprise fintech company HighRadius, Indian grocery startup Otipy (which SIG led a $10.2 million Series A for), Chinese game-development platform MetaApp (SIG led a $100 million round), and Indonesian dental-care platform Satu Dental (a since-exited position).

💰 Check size: Over $5M

Tech Coast Angels was founded in 1997 by Luis Villalobos as one of the largest angel investor networks in the United States, built around a mutual-benefit nonprofit structure and originally centered on Southern California's Los Angeles, Orange County, and Inland Empire tech scenes. In January 2024 the organization rebranded to TCA Venture Group, a change it describes as reflecting a broader investment scope beyond technology alone — the network today spans roughly 400 individual angel investors organized across six regional chapters, including Orange County, Los Angeles, Pasadena, Inland Empire, and Florida/Georgia, plus additional members across the U.S. and Canada. Since 1997 the network has invested in more than 540 companies, deploying over $300 million of its own members' seed and early Series A capital, with its portfolio going on to attract more than $2.2 billion in follow-on investment. Notable exits include Procore Technologies, Mindbody, Green Dot Corporation, TrueCar, and Bluebeam Software, across 11 IPOs and 106+ total exits to date.

💰 Check size: $100K–$500K

Techstars is a global startup accelerator founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado by David Cohen, Brad Feld, David Brown, and future Colorado governor Jared Polis. It relocated its headquarters to New York City in February 2024, around the same time it consolidated operations and closed several of its original U.S. accelerator sites (including Boulder and Seattle). David Cohen returned as CEO in 2024 after Maëlle Gavet's resignation. Techstars runs intensive, cohort-based three-month accelerator programs built around mentorship, growth, and investment phases, typically admitting around 12 companies per cohort out of a roughly 1-2% acceptance rate. Each accepted company receives $220,000 in funding in exchange for 6% equity, plus access to benefits and perks the firm values at over $5 million, including $100,000 in AWS credits. Beyond the U.S., Techstars has run programs in cities including Paris, Dubai, Amsterdam, and across Africa. Notable alumni include Uber, DigitalOcean, SendGrid, Sketchfab, and Sphero. No Philippines- or Southeast Asia-specific program was found in available sources.

💰 Check size: $100K–$500K

Thrive Capital is a New York-based venture capital and growth-equity firm founded in 2009 by Joshua Kushner, who was 24 years old at the time. Starting with a first fund of just $5 million, the firm has grown into one of the most prominent technology investors of its generation — assets under management were reported at over $50 billion as of 2026, with its tenth flagship fund alone targeting more than $10 billion. Unlike many venture firms that spread capital across a large number of bets, Thrive has been known for concentrating conviction in a relatively small number of companies, aiming to build deep, multi-round relationships with founders. Former Harvard Business School dean Nitin Nohria joined as the firm's first executive chair in 2022. Thrive was an early investor in Instagram, GitHub, Spotify, and Twitch, and its more recent portfolio spans Stripe, Databricks, OpenAI, and A24 — reflecting a broad mandate across internet, software, and AI-enabled businesses rather than a single narrow sector.

Tiger Global Management is a New York City-based investment firm (Solow Building, 9 West 57th Street) founded in March 2001 by Chase Coleman III, a former Tiger Management analyst and protege of Julian Robertson who received over $25 million in seed capital to launch the fund as one of the original "Tiger Cubs." As of May 2024 the firm managed approximately $55.9 billion in assets with 162 employees. Tiger Global runs two roughly equally sized strategies: public equities (long-short hedge funds investing in publicly traded companies) and private equity/venture capital (historically led by Scott Shleifer until his departure in November 2023). It focuses on internet, software, consumer, and financial-technology companies, typically concentrating on later, growth-stage private rounds, and has invested in Facebook, LinkedIn, Stripe, Coinbase, Spotify, ByteDance, Nubank, and SenseTime. After severe losses in 2022 (its hedge fund declined roughly 52%), the firm rebounded with about 24% returns in 2024 alongside a broader recovery in technology stocks. No Philippines-specific investment activity was confirmed from available sources.

Vertex Ventures is the venture capital brand of Vertex Holdings, a Singapore-headquartered investment holding company established over 30 years ago as a venture arm connected to Temasek. Rather than operating as a single fund, Vertex is structured as a network of seven independently-managed regional and sector partnerships — Vertex Ventures US, Vertex Ventures Israel, Vertex Ventures China, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, Vertex Ventures Japan, Vertex Ventures HC (healthcare), and Vertex Growth — collectively managing roughly US$6.8 billion in assets with more than 100 investment professionals globally and over 300 active portfolio companies. The entity most directly relevant to Southeast Asia, Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, is led by managing partners Kee Lock Chua, Joo Hock Chua, and Ben Mathias, is headquartered at Raffles City Tower in Singapore, and manages approximately US$1.5 billion. It has backed more than 90 companies including regional ride-hailing and delivery giant Grab, alongside other network-wide portfolio companies such as CyberArk, NIUM (formerly Instarem), Waze, and Desktop Metal.